Network traffic data is the pivot of input in many network tasks but its direct measurement can be insufferably costly. In this paper, we propose a network traffic recovery method which only requires the conveniently measurable link-load traffics. We arrange the traffic data as a third-order tensor and utilize the triple decomposition technique proposed very recently by Qi et al. (2021). The studied model is a differentialble unconstrained minimization problem, which can be efficiently solved by a Barzilai–Borwein (BB) gradient algorithm. We prove that the generated iteration sequence can globally converge to a certain stationary point of the objective function. The numerical simulations on three open-source traffic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms.